Hot hatch or dynamic diesel? It’s a
difficult choice to make – one to battle out between head and heart, with
various factors to consider…
We’ve recently published full road tests of
both the Mk 7 Golf GTI and the GTD, in our December 2013 and January 2014
issues respectively, but we make no apologies for revisiting some aspects of
these models in this comparison feature. Judging from the amount of interest in
these particular road tests, and subsequent enquiries about our experiences of
both the GTI and the GTD, it seems that many prospective buyers are having
difficulty in deciding between them…
It’s almost, but not quite, a decision to
be battled out between heart and head. Do you go for the undoubted dynamic advantages
of the high-performance GTI, a true hot hatch that also returns good fuel
economy; or enjoy the superior fuel efficiency and long-distance driving
capability of the GTD, a car which also provides more than ample performance
and excellent handling.
The
Golf GTI is a brilliant car and the longstanding benchmark in its class
It’s not actually a new dilemma. The
diesel-engined models have been gaining an increasing reputation for
performance for quite some time, ever since the Mk 2 GTD of 1989, but it was
during the Mk 4 generation that it really came on strong, with first 110, then
115 and 130 PS versions of the 1.9 TDI, until Volkswagen was soon marketing
both a 150 PS version of the Mk 4 Golf GT 1.9 TDI and the 150 PS Mk 4 Golf GTI
1.8T in the same model range, and it became obvious that here were two very
different ways of achieving much the same thing.
In fact, at GTI International in May 2002,
Volkswagen UK’s PR Department staged a Press Challenge on the quarter-mile drag
strip where a selection of motoring journalists were able to drive examples of
both models against the clock to compare the acceleration times they recorded.
The
Golf GTD offers a compelling blend of performance, economy and usability
Those results, both the 0-60 times and
quarter-mile ETs, were published in full i n our July 2002 issue and it still
makes interesting reading. After discounting the obviously dodgy drivers and
averaging out the remaining times, there was not a lot in it at all, with just
a few tenths of a second between them. Fastest 1.8T time was a 15.58 ET (0-60
in 7.30) and the fastest TDI 150 was a 15.82 (0-60 in 7.64). Indeed, one
entrant recorded near-identical times for both cars, with 16.11 (7.70) for the
1.8T and 16.14 (7.94) for the TDI, but that was Mike Orford from the VW Press
Office who might just have been trying to prove their point!
Of course, what wasn’t compared was the
fuel consumption for both models, but there wasn’t sufficient time for all
entrants to drive a 50-mile local road route to compare mpg figures. The TDI
would undoubtedly have been better by a large margin. Our contemporary road
tests for the 150 PS GTI and GT TDI show the TDI ahead by 20 mpg when driven
conservatively, and by 13 mpg in terms of an overall average figure.
The
GTI complements the sports seats – the carbon-fibre-look dash inserts,
soft-touch plastics, high-resolution colour displays and white/red
instrumentation – that make up the rest of the high-quality cabin
Although we’ve not since had a GTI and a
GTD which have been quite so closely matched with regards to maximum power
output, the principle has remained much the same with subsequent generations.
Examination of our table of comparative performance figures shows that while
the difference in outright pace is not all that significant, especially
considering that you can never drive flat-out on public roads anyway, the
disparity in terms of fuel consumption is quite obvious and much more relevant
to the real world.
